Featured on the recent Big Sean track “Blessings,” Drake colourfully declared that he didn’t care “’bout where the Grammys go, I just gave out Grammys on my Instagram.”
So it’s safe to say the red-hot Toronto rapper is not sweating the outcome of his four nominations this Sunday.
His ambivalence is perhaps understandable: he’s now been nominated 22 times but won only once.
READ MORE: Only one Canadian has won Grammy for Best New Artist
Last year, his sophisticated “Nothing Was the Same” — along with Kendrick Lamar’s classic “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City” and Kanye West’s thrilling “Yeezus” — lost out to Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s featherweight (and already dated) The Heist for best rap album.
Drake didn’t show up anyway.
His Grammy frustration is hardly unique among Canadian artists. Below, five other Canadian acts who grew accustomed to Grammy ennui.
RUSH
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame isn’t the only dusty institution to infuriate Rush‘s zealous followers.
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Though the rock hall eventually ended its exclusion of the Toronto power-prog trio, Rush has still never won a Grammy.
Even the dexterous band’s seven total nominations (spread across 30 years) feels paltry.
Perhaps there’s comfort in the calibre of artists they lost to: Brian Wilson, Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa.
NEIL YOUNG
The Toronto-born, Winnipeg-reared rock iconoclast won his first Grammy Award in 2009. It was for best packaging.
The ornery icon has only won once for his music, the next year — and 40 years after Young released the multi-platinum After the Gold Rush.
The Grammys ignored that album and the decade of Young classics that followed. Still, he was happy to receive his first Grammy in 2010, marvelling: “I appreciate this very much.”
LEONARD COHEN
The dark poet’s Grammy history is appropriately gloomy.
Somehow, the Montreal songwriter has won just one Grammy over a nearly 50-year music career, and his sole trophy came as a featured artist on Herbie Hancock’s album of the year winner River: The Joni Letters in 2007.
Joni Mitchell received a new trophy that night too, her seventh.
AVRIL LAVIGNE
The Grammys’ love affair with the sneering pop-punk trend-setter was short and, for Lavigne, ultimately unsatisfying.
She was nominated eight times in a two-year period but didn’t win once.
In 2003, she went home empty handed despite five nominations. That places her among the top 15 multi-category shutouts of all time — alongside Drake.
BRYAN ADAMS
With his Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves supersmash “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” ruling the charts, Adams swaggered into the 1992 Grammy Awards tied with R.E.M. with a leading seven nominations.
It’s fortunate Adams won for best song written for a motion picture, because it’s still his only Grammy, after 15 total nominations.
Well, at least he has one. That’s still more than Randy Bachman, Burton Cummings, Gordon Lightfoot, Robbie Robertson, Paul Anka, Justin Bieber, Feist or Deadmau5, whose sixth career nomination will be contested on Sunday.
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